, Roberts explains he'd just engaged in an email exchange with some fellow Green Party members "to assuage concerns that the public might end up branding our political party a 'Marijuana Party' if statewide candidates like myself decided to campaign heavily on the theme of legalizing pot up until election day."

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James P. Gray, formerly an Orange County Superior Court Judge, has been a strong advocate of legalizing marijuana and industrial hemp since 1993. Now a Libertarian, he was originally a lifelong Republican.

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican Congressman in the 46th Congressional District, has signed letters favoring pot decriminalization and has co-sponsored federal legislation to legalize medical marijuana.

Chuck DeVore, a Republican State Assemblyman in the 70th Assembly District, not long ago co-sponsored a bill that would have legalized the cultivation of industrial hemp in the State of California.

In the interest of full accuracy, Roberts does note that DeVore came out against Prop 19, the weed-legalizing initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot. But Gray has become the law enforcement face of the Yes on 19 campaign, and Rohrabacher's Huntington Beach office "is literally the Grand Central Station of marijuana legalization efforts in Orange County," according to Roberts.

"The irony here," he says, "is that [DeVore], Rohrabacher, and Gray as Republicans have done more work to make weed legal than every single Democratic Party politician who has ever served in public office behind the Orange Curtain."

As for his own party: "All I'm suggesting that the Greens do is snatch it away from them before the Democrats start to catch on."

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.